


Two Rounds and a Sound

by sinuous_curve



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Avengers Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 03:55:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/617805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinuous_curve/pseuds/sinuous_curve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Clint is, for the most part, surprised he’s not dead. </i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Granted, he’s handcuffed to a metal chair in a blank room which doesn’t particularly bode well for how long that’ll keep being true. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Rounds and a Sound

**Author's Note:**

> Written for myystic for the clint_hawkeye @ LJ exchange.

Clint is, for the most part, surprised he’s not dead. 

Granted, he’s handcuffed to a metal chair in a blank room which doesn’t particularly bode well for how long that’ll keep being true. He shifts a little, stretching out his legs to see if he can reach one of the table’s legs with the toe of his boot. The cuffs clack against the chair as he slides down, but he’s still a good three inches away. Clint wishes, for a flat split second, that he’d ever taken up one of the acrobats on their casual offers to teach him a couple tricks. 

He figures he was a marksman. It’s not like anyone expected _them_ to be able to shoot an apple off a human head from thirty-five feet away. 

“Fuck,” he sighs, straightening back up only when his arm starts to tingle in shitty, pinched nerve way. 

The thing that’s bugging him -- inasmuch as that word is so entirely and vastly inappropriate for whatever this is -- is that he can’t figure out what happened. Obviously he’s got the logistics of it -- he was on the roof playing watch, cop two blocks off sighted along an arrow, and then a split second of thinking he really did feel like he was being watched and. Bam. Something hard cracking against his skull and then the dreamless deep dark nothing of having had your brain bashed (partially) in. 

If he tips his head back far enough he can just feel the edge of the goose egg against his shoulder. It’s tender. He can feel it throbbing. 

The most obvious answer is that this is a revenge thing, but. Clint’s sense of his own value isn’t so inflated that he thinks he’s important. He is a nobody who happens to have a useful, eccentric skill that appeals to people with a certain level of theatricality. It’s not for nothing that the silhouette of bow being drawn strikes a particular disbelieving chord that cocking a gun doesn’t quite manage. 

But if this were a revenge thing -- “I’d be dead already,” Clint murmurs, fingers twitching at the small of his back. 

But if it’s not a revenge thing, then. What the fuck is it? 

He’s not entirely sure how much time crawls past. The thing about blank rooms is that it’s hard to get a sense of anything from them -- time or place or threat or even what the odds are there’s a bathroom he’ll be allowed to use in any close proximity. Clint has spent enough of his life folded into small, dark spaces to have a logical knowledge of how unreliable your perception can be. The fact that he’s not hungry or that tired says it hasn’t been the five or six hours his freaked out lizard brain is trying to insist. 

It’s weird that there’s not a mirror. 

A window, obviously, because even carnies find a way to catch the same five repeated episodes of _Law and Order_ eating shitty food at rest stops and on ten inch black and white TVs with Frankenstein rabbit ears balanced on someone’s vanity cum kitchen table. Clint doesn’t see one, is the thing. Even craning his neck to look over his shoulder it’s just more flat, blank wall. 

It’s actually only then that it occurs to him that he doesn’t see a door, either. 

“So what?” Clint asks, raising an eyebrow. “I’ve been abducted by goddamn aliens?” 

And then a piece of a wall recesses with a soft hiss of compressed air and slides to the side. The hole is door-sized and Clint blinks at it, because he was joking about the alien idea. Five seconds later, a guy in a neatly pressed black suit steps through with a manilla folder in one hand. He looks like an accountant and Clint hopes that he’s not the one that brained him. 

The door, if that’s what it is, closes behind him. He crosses to the identical metal chair on the other side of the table and sits, then flips the folder open and neatens the thick sheaf of papers. Clint cocks his head and studies him. He’s oddly normal: average height, average build, nondescript features. He really, really does look an accountant. 

“Mister Barton,” the guy says politely by way of a greeting. 

Clint blinks. “Hi.”

“Before we start, you should know that your,” there is a very slight pause, “friends tripped a silent alarm and were apprehended by local authorities.” 

He relays this information in a tone Clint very vaguely associates with high school history teachers. Not that he ever had a high school history teacher, or any high school teacher at all, but. It’s the same mostly bored, but with a mildly hopeful tinge that he recognizes from TV. And the occasional movie that he managed to sneak into. 

“I’m sure they’ll survive?” Clint doesn’t really mean for that to turn into question, but this is so far outside his realm of experience with police questioning. Or alien abduction; he doesn’t really feel like he can give that one up yet. 

The man nods. “I believe so. In any case, my name is Coulson.” 

“Coulson,” Clint repeats, nodding his head since he can’t wave. 

Coulson nods, kimming over the papers arrayed in front of him. Clint can’t really get much from them, not trying to read upside down and backwards. But he’s just about positive that’s his picture in the upper corner of the top sheet and CLINTON BARTON is written in conveniently big, bold letters across the top. 

If this is revenge, it is one that has been frighteningly well researched. That’s probably bad. 

“And you,” Coulson says, after what Clint is fairly sure was more theatrical pause to read than a necessary one, “are Clinton Barton. Born January seventh, nineteen seventy-one. Both your parents Edith and Charles are deceased, your brother Bernard’s whereabouts are unknown. You traveled with Tibolt’s Circus after running away from your fourth foster home with your brother. Trained at the bow by one Buck Chrisholm, or Trickshot.” 

Coulson looks up. “How am I doing so far? Stop me if I get something wrong.” 

“How do--” Clint starts, meaning to ask how he _knows_ all that, since Clint Barton disappeared from official record at the same time two orphans split from their group home and no one really cared enough to look. But he swallows the rest of that. “Why do you _care_?” 

“And for the last several years,” Coulson continues, like Clint didn’t say anything at all. “You’ve been involving yourself more and more deeply in the illegal activities of the renamed Circus of Crime.” 

Clint flinches, a little, because he gets that he comes from spangles and sparkle but that name is still bullshit to the nth degree. It sounds cartoonish in an entirely accidental way, and he’s never been able to convince the others that if he has to stifle the urge to snicker it at? Everyone else is already laughing. He frowns, rolling his shoulders and glancing around the blank room again. Like an exit will suddenly, conveniently materialize if he wishes hard enough. 

It’s not shame, exactly. Clearly whoever brained him knew what he was doing on that rooftop. But still. 

“And that makes you what?” Clint asks, curling his lip into a sneer. “Some secret anti-carnie task force?” 

Coulson’s mouth crooks into a small smile. “No. In this context I’m a -- recruiter.” 

Clint cocks his head. “A recruiter?”

“Yes,” Coulson nods, closing the file and folding his hands on top. 

“To fucking what?” Clint asks deliberately, shifting in the goddamn metal chair again. Not that it helps, and the sound of the cuffs clacking and the pull in his shoulders just makes him want to smash Coulson the accountant’s face into the very hard and shiny surface of the table. He doesn’t actually realize he’s pushing forward until metal cuts into his wrists hard enough to hurt. 

Coulson raises an eyebrow. “Is this what you want to do with your life?” he asks. 

Clint exhales hard. “This being?” 

“Keeping watch over theft,” Coulson says mildly. “I’m sure before much longer, with your particular skills, they’ll have you moving into more lucrative arenas. There’s actually quite an impressive range in price, for assassinations. If you look at the data.” 

Something in Clint’s chest goes suddenly and unpleasantly tight. It’s not that -- he’s not _unaware_ that there are only so many trajectories someone whose sole skill is being able to shoot arrows really accurately can take. He’s more not been thinking about how the prospect of that doesn’t bother him as much as it should. But no one’s said it, yet. It’s just been higher up eyes on him when he comes back with the others, appraising. Taking stock.

“You do what you’re good at,” Clint says. Which is a non-answer. 

The corner of Coulson’s mouth quirks. “You are very good at it,” he says. “And I have an alternative.”

Clint sits back. He can feel the throb in his goose egg starting to curl tendrils around the rest of his head. “Oh?”

“Oh,” Coulson echoes. “I work for an organization called shield.”

“Shield?”

“Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division.” 

“Which is?” Clint cocks his head. 

Coulson smiles. “More classified than you’re currently cleared for. The offer is this,” he continues, before Clint can ask what the fuck that’s supposed to mean. “Join us. We’ll train you. Take what you can already do and add to that skillset. And then you can help save the world instead of biting off little pieces of it.”

Clint really, really doesn’t mean to. But he laughs. 

“You’ve got be kidding me,” he says, shaking his head and wishing his hands were free so he could shove his hair back. 

“Why?” 

“Because!” Clint snorts, snapping his gaze back to Coulson. Who is calmly sitting there, hands folded. “I am an ex-carnie fucking nobody. How am I going to save the fucking world?”

“Right now you can’t,” Coulson says. “Six months with us and you’ll be able to answer your own question.” 

Clint shakes his head. This is so far beyond the realm of fucking unbelievable that he really does feel like they’ve dumped him into a physical manifestation of the Twilight Zone. He fidgets, shifting his weight back and forth and tapping the toe of his boot against the immaculate tile floor. This is _stupid_ , this is _irrational_. 

“You’re capable of more than you think,” Coulson says. “But the other half is that you come with me, or you can be delivered into the hands of the police. I’m sure you’ve been sold down the river by now.”

That’s low, Clint thinks. But helpful. 

“How long do I have to think about it?” 

“How long do you want to sit in this room?” 

“What if you’re wrong?” 

Coulson smiles again, thin and sharp in a way that makes Clint rethink his assessment of how easily he could take him down if needed. “I’m not wrong,” he says. “So?” 

Even as he says, “Sure, why the fuck not?” he’s already thinking about an exit plan. 

Certainty comes six months later, give or take, standing on the deck of the first helicarrier in SHIELD black with his bow case slung over his back and his first solo mission orders in hand. He’s going to Russia, so says Fury. Maria told him, “Good luck, comrade,” in deadpan. Coulson’s leaning against the railing beside him while they wait for the transport to fuel up. He says, “I told you I wasn’t wrong.”


End file.
